Robert H. Johnston, 77; Explored Ancient Documents With Digital Technology

Robert H. Johnston, an archeologist and teacher who combined his interest in ancient texts with digital imaging technology to help uncover new information about the Dead Sea Scrolls and other rare documents, died Oct. 19 at his home in Rochester, N.Y. He was 77.

I learned much about Johnson in the past five years as the Carl Denham Restoration Project worked to decipher various etched artwork and glyphs present on "Skull Island" artifacts recovered in France. Much of what we were able to piece together was thanks to techniques that grew directly from Johnson's innovations.

From the Los Angeles Times:

"Bob was a pioneer," said Bruce Zuckerman, director of the West Semitic Research Project at USC. "He built a bridge between technical enhancement and the humanities."

Zuckerman supplied Johnston with photographs of the so-called Temple Scroll, which is 28 feet, the longest and one of the most important in the Dead Sea collection.

Johnston and his team, including Roger L. Easton, an imaging scientist on the school faculty, as well as others at Eastman Kodak Co. and the Xerox Corp., found 18 Hebrew letters on the scroll, which describes an ideal Hebrew temple.

"That might not sound like a lot, but whole matters of history can turn on a single, specific letter," Zuckerman said.

Johnston and his team made other breakthroughs when they examined a 10th century copy of a treatise by Archimedes, the Greek mathematician who died in 212 BC.

The original Archimedes text, "On the Method of Mechanical Theorems," had been erased so the parchment could be reused as a prayer book. In addition to new text, the pages were covered with painted images and candle wax.

"We were able to extract things that had been trapped," Easton said Thursday of the book and other documents he and Johnston examined. "Bob was the conduit between the scholars and the technicians."

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"Tsunami Giant": A well-produced video hoax

Found at www.giantology.typepad.com

The video pegs the remains at 150 feet long, and the unidentified creature "may change paleontologists' understanding of prehistoric biology." Great visuals.

Click HERE for video (.mov) format.

Unfortunately, in the case of Carl Denham's "Island of the Rock Skull" (Pulau Batu Tengkorak), the tsunami seems to have further obscured and hidden the fragments of the long-sunk land mass rather than expose anything new.

One Legend Found, Many Still to Go

Further on the giant squid as well as other enigmas, this time from the New York Times:

"THE human instinct to observe nature has always been mixed with a tendency to embroider upon it. So it is that, over the ages, societies have lived alongside not only real animals, but a shadow bestiary of fantastic ones - mermaids, griffins, unicorns and the like. None loomed larger than the giant squid, the kraken, a great, malevolent devil of the deep. 'One of these Sea-Monsters,' Olaus Magnus wrote in 1555, 'will drown easily many great ships.'"


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Giant squid 'an active predator'

Japanese zoologists have made the first recording of a live giant squid, one of the strangest and most elusive creatures in the world. The size of a bus, with vast eyes and a querulous beak, Architeuthis has long nourished myth and literature. Until now, the only evidence of giant squids was extraordinarily rare - from dead squids that washed up on remote shores or got snagged on a long-line fish hook or from ships' crews who spotted the deep-sea denizen as it made a sortie near the surface. But almost nothing was known about where and how Architeuthis lives, feeds and reproduces. And, given the problems of getting down to its home in the ocean depths, no-one had ever obtained pictures of a live one. Scientists went to extreme lengths, backed by TV companies, to be the first.

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"Colossal Squid" Revives Legends of Sea Monsters

But, if they're so big, why can't we find them?

Scientists claim to find Homer's Ithaca

A British team using Australian technology believe they may have solved a mystery that has baffled scholars for more than 2,000 years - the whereabouts of Ithaca a rocky island described in Homer's Odyssey. The team led by management consultant and businessman Robert Bittlestone claimed it had found compelling evidence in support of the location of ancient Ithaca. In a new book: Odysseus Unbound - The Search for Homer's Ithaca, Bittlestone concludes that Ithaca was not the Greek island now called Ithaki, but was instead located on what is believed to have been the previously separated western peninsula of the island of Kefallinia, an area now called Paliki. Geospatial imaging software from Australian firm OziExplorer was integral to the discovery, Bittlestone said. The claim is being plugged as one of the most important classical discoveries since the unearthing of Troy in north-western Turkey in the 1870s.

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Ghosts in the Lens, Tricks in the Darkroom

From the story:

"Posing for a carte de visite, the vicomte, after Disdéri had snapped several dour shots of him in the de rigueur black frock coat and top hat, decided he would remove his clothes, all except socks and shoes, don what looks very much like a hot water bottle on his head but was in fact some sort of helmet, hold a shield and pretend to be a ghost. His friend (raised eyebrows, forefinger scratching forehead) acts as if the apparition startles him. (He doesn't look half startled enough.) Disdéri also sloshed around some chemical on the exposed negative of the naked vicomte to make the image look less corporeal."

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And HERE as well.